Saturday Morning Dispatch No.3
Real quick! I’m excited to be offering a Holiday Special for paid subscriptions. From now until December 24th, when you purchase a 1-year gift subscription, you’ll get a free 1-year subscription for yourself!
Now, on with the Dispatch!
A thing that works for our family.
Chromatic Scale of Colors
With three girls who are all fairly close in age and ability, there are certain items that we’re bound to have multiples of. Sometimes it doesn’t matter who gets which, but sometimes it is really nice for each kid to have her own, and for everyone else to know that it’s hers. So I bought a monogramming machine!
I DID NOT DO THAT.
What I did was: I assigned each kid a color, based on her own self-proclaimed favorite. Now, whenever I have to buy three of something that probably shouldn’t be shared, I get one in each of those colors, and everyone knows whose is whose. It minimizes a certain kind of fighting, and it helps the grown-ups to stay organized. Some examples:
Bedside water bottles. I’d finally had it with the requests for water after lights out, and then the spilling of the water all over the place, so I got each girl one of these in her own color. Highly recommend.
Toothbrushes. Self-explanatory.
Bowls and plates. I think this is actually how we started doing the color thing, and it still works. The kid with a cheese-activated gag reflex never accidentally gets cheese served to her. The kid who gets distracted doesn’t accidentally eat from someone else’s plate. And after a meal, I get a visual of who ate what and how much.
School snow gear bags. Just this week we had a crisis over snow gear getting mixed up - perfect opportunity to employ color assignments.
“But what if the thing you’re buying doesn’t come in the right colors?” you might be wondering. Well, each kid has a secondary color (kid #1: green and blue; kid #2: yellow and orange; kid #3: pink and purple). And then if that product still doesn’t have the right colors, I’ll probably look for a different option. We don’t use this strategy with everything, but I’m telling you, it has been low-key super helpful.
Who does your makeup?
This is a story about finding ways to say yes.
Before school on Wednesday, my 4- and 6-year-old were all set up to do some watercolors, which obviously double as face and body paint in our house. I happened to notice the 4-year-old setting up her face painting business, directing the 6-year-old to “sit here.” Honestly, this would normally be fine with me. I could never stand to wake my sleeping babies and I hate to interrupt siblings playing nicely. But, since they were about to head out the door, and we already don’t get their hair brushed half the time, sending them to school covered in paint was a no.
They were disappointed.
You know how all the advice about making mornings with kids easier includes the hot tip to wake up before your kids and get yourself showered and dressed and coffeed and then make their hot breakfast and greet them when they come down the stairs? Well I’m going to go ahead and say that if I had done all of that, I probably wouldn’t have had the idea to let my kids do this:
No mommies were harmed in the making of this face.
I don’t consider myself an especially playful mom. I’ve spent a good chunk of motherhood under a grimy cloud of anxiety, which made me very good at saying no. Coming out of the fog (thanks to an awesome doctor, the right medication, and my incredibly good-looking and steadfast husband) has made all the difference, and now I find myself looking for ways to say yes to my kids. A few examples:
“We can’t have a cookie right now, but why don’t you pick the one you want and we’ll put it on a plate for after dinner.”
Pulling over on the way home from school so my middle child with big feelings could get out of the car to see the baby Jesus in someone’s front yard nativity display. (He’s kind of hidden behind the wise men and the fact that she knows he’s there but she can’t see him when we drive by is very upsetting.)
Keeping my mouth shut when one of my kids climbed on the counter to get a plastic champagne flute and a silly straw, then transferred her milk from a boring cup to the fun one. And obviously,
“Hmm… how about you paint my face instead?”
Saying yes isn’t about giving my kids everything they want or letting them behave like they’ve escaped from a zoo. It’s about curbing my urge to try and control everything all the time. It’s a chance for me to build connection with my kids, and to find my own ways of becoming a playful mom. And now that my brain is cooperating more, saying yes to my kids is usually really fun for me too.
What are ways that you say yes to your kids?
Okay, but how do you spell it?
Because celebrating and traditions are my favorite thing ever of all time, and I love learning about how other people do it, I asked my girlfriend, Laura, to tell me about how her family celebrates Hanukkah. And, soulmate that she is, she proceeded to tell me all about the food. YESSS. Here’s what I learned:
Early work by Maurice Sendak for the book Happy Hanukah Everybody by Hyman and Alice Chanover (1955).
Laura’s hosting a latke party for 40 people, and she says a Cuisinart shredding disc is essential to grating that many potatoes and onions. Also having your husband make them.
She said you can make latkes with other root vegetables, and recommended I check out Jake Cohen’s cookbooks, Jew-ish and I Could Nosh, for modern twists on traditional Jewish foods. Jake is hilarious and I immediately added both books to my Christmas list.
She doesn’t like deep frying things so she leaves the sufganiyot (jelly-filled donuts) to others, but she does bake challah. She bakes babka, too, but her favorite is the chocolate one from Breads Bakery in New York. (It does look really good, but is it better than cinnamon…?)
And then she told me about some new skin products she likes, but that’s neither here nor there.
What are some of your traditions? Please share! Hanukkah will have started by the time next week’s newsletter comes out, so to those who celebrate, Chag Sameach!
Quote of the Day
“Decent option.” —my friend Laura on Trader Joe’s latkes
The holidays are in full force and I am here for it. We’re getting our tree this weekend, joining some friends at a holiday meet-and-greet at our local wildlife center where we’ll get to hang out with some critters (will I get to pet the skunk is what I want to know), and then Ryan and I are going out for an actual date at an actual restaurant to celebrate our wedding anniversary. And then Monday I’m hoping we can get our act together to go see the CPKC Christmas Train because it sounds kind of awesome and like a thing I might want to turn into a tradition. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you next week with a brand new Discovery & Play Guide.
That time we got married.
Love,
Kathryn